Abstract

A clash between two competing interpretations of what the early Wittgenstein was after all engaged in, with regard to the role of philosophy, has come to the fore over the past decade or so as a result of refreshed interest in the Tractatus and a radical re-reading of what was more or less a coagulated area. As is well known a completely new interpretation of the Tractatus has begun to take hold, the so-called ‘new Wittgenstein’, taking him literally at his ‘therapeutic’ word, so to speak: in clashing with the received reading of the text, and especially its opening part, a reading which has traditionally taken the metaphysical view expressed therein at its face value, the new interpretation tries to resolve the tension between Wittgenstein’s pronouncements regarding the nonsensical nature of philosophical propositions including his own and the metaphysical picture of the world/language presented at the opening part.

In this paper I explore the possibility of reconciling a resolute commitment to the metaphysical picture with the ‘therapeutic’ rival side which, cast more generally, comes close to the standard objection that the whole notion of conceptual schemes and the scheme/content or language/world or the external/internal distinction is nothing but a philosophical artifice; i.e. crafted by the very metaphysical picture that the opponents wish to discredit by means of Wittgenstein’s own pronouncements. The retaining of the metaphysical picture as bona fide and non-artificial, in congruence to the nonsensicality thesis, is here permitted only in the sense of a formal ontology that makes no substantive ontological commitments save those about the logical scaffolding of language the “application” of which – as Wittgenstein insists in the Philosophical Remarks – can only show the “essence of the world”, i.e. make metaphysical claims but only via language.

Can we avail ourselves of resources within the Tractatus itself that would allow us such a reconciling move? For this I propose a Leibnizian reading of the opening part of the text in terms of a sustained analogy permitted by Leibniz’s overall project of combinatorial analysis aiming, ideally, at a transparency of human thought that would reveal the relevant formal structure of propositional entailments parallel to what Wittgenstein says of atomic facts, the logical form of objects as equivalent to their possibility of occurrence in atomic facts and as already pre-contained, entailing the unavailability of truly ‘new possibilities’. The Leibnizian reading helps in disclosing the formal ontology needed for my interpretation, in particular via the notion of coming to actually ‘see’ (with ‘our own naked eyes’ as Leibniz says) the logical features of reality (not any substantive articulations) by means of the logical scaffolding being revealed.